How competitive are you with your system?

toddalin

If you make a recording, it should be true to the original direct transfer, regardless of what you are listening on.

Of course. But if you use lossy media (YouTube, Spotify, mp3 files), the recording will not be "original" at all. Rather, it will have discarded data for the purpose of reducing file size. Fidelity is also lost in the process - even though many will find the result pleasing.

Making a truly high-fidelity recording is not as easy as some here believe.

Several years back I attended an audio demo wherein the system did sound excellent. The dealer asked the attendants how the system compared to real ’live’ music. Some folks came out and stated this system sounded better than live to their ears! 

I thought this reply was not correct and showed that those who made the point were perhaps not listening enough to live music, even though it was probably in the top 5% of systems I had heard. Now, if we took a canned version of this system and listened to it via video online, i believe that a few things would be evident. 1) the system would sound only a fraction as good as when heard live and 2) the ability to really determine its quality would be severely diminished. Therefore, personally i give very little credence to the SQ on videos on the web as to how any particular product or system sounds. 

@cleeds have you listen to the audio recordings of my OKTAN6 system that I shared with the group? How lossy do those sound, and if you extrapolate the level of compression & lossyness that you think is happening because of the YouTube encoding process the where does that land them or put them in terms of sound quality?

@cleeds

But the direct transfer undergoes the same transformation, so the two should be equivalent.

No one is talking the ultimate in fidelity.  I keep noting that there are qualities that cannot be conveyed (e.g., soundstage, imaging), but the general character and smoothness of the frequency balance, openness of the sound, etc. can be.  We/I are/am only listening to hear if they sound the same and where the differences lie.

If the direct cut is rich in bass and the system is not, accounting for some floor bounce, we got a problem.

If the system shows a peak or resonance that is not in the direct transfer..., we got a problem.

If the system sounds muffled or devoid of harmonics (heavily veiled), and the direct transfer doesn’t..., we got a problem.

The list goes on.

As I said, nearfield monitoring is best for this exercise.

Mihorn, ever seen one of these?  It’s a Wavetouch modified Oppo-95.  This one is available locally.

@cleeds For your reference, I have two high-end studio grade mastering systems here at home so I’m quite intimately familiar with what goes on during the mastering process and the loss in audio quality suffer through the YouTube process is not that detrimental when you start with a highly resolving system and make a good quality recording of its sound at the listener’s sitting position. 

Let’s put your theory to the test and tell us how the audio recording embedded in the video is different than what you hear in the room. Use it to illustrate, highlight, and point out the differences in sound quality that you proclaim.